Source: Breitbart | VIEW ORIGINAL POST ==>
During an interview at the Sundance Film Festival (is that still a thing?), director Quentin Tarantino said the movies died in 2019:
What the fuck is a movie now? What the fuck is a movie now? It plays in theaters for a token release of four fucking weeks, and by the second week you can watch it on television. I didn’t get into all this for diminishing returns. … It was bad enough in 2019 and that was the last fucking year of movies. And that was a shit deal as far as I was concerned. The fact that it’s gotten drastically worse, and that it’s a show pony exercise — the theatrical release…. Theater? You can’t do that. Theater? Yeah, I pay a lot of fucking money to get in that seat. But there’s no fucking taping it. There’s no fucking cell phones. … you own the audience for that time… And it’s not just about doing art. It’s about wowing them. It’s about giving them a great night out that makes it worth it to them, and that to me is fucking exciting.
The background here is that Tarantino is currently working on a play, so he’s explaining why that excites him more than making another movie.
The 61-year-old Oscar winner has repeatedly said that his next movie will be his last, and he was close to production on The Movie Critic starring Brad Pitt when he decided to pull the plug and move to playwriting.
The obvious dividing line between 2019 and today was the COVID pandemic, which effectively changed the theatrical business forever, where theatrical releases are currently made available in a matter of weeks at home as a pay-per-view offering. What had been a three-month window is forever shattered.
From a business point of view, this makes sense. The studios want to get those home-bound viewers while the theatrical publicity is still hot. Why pay for two publicity campaigns — theatrical and home — when you can pay for one?
Tarantino is not speaking from a business or even artistic viewpoint. He’s speaking as something sorely missing in the entertainment world today — a showman. “And it’s not just about doing art,” he said. “It’s about wowing them. It’s about giving them a great night out that makes it worth it to them, and that to me is fucking exciting.”
Exactly.
For Tarantino, it’s all (or mostly) about grabbing the audience by the throat through a shared experience that knocks them out. As a showman, that’s what matters.
Imagine you build a rollercoaster, and you believe it’s the greatest rollercoaster ever created, but only one person at a time rides it. As the creator, you lose the satisfaction of the group experiencing your creation, and that’s a very different thing.
If Tarantino has hit play, that group experience will happen night after night for hundreds of nights. If he has a hit movie, that group experience begins to deflate after a few weeks when that hit movie is available on TV.
That appears to be what Tarantino means by diminishing returns.
The other issue is how streaming (which includes pay-per-view) has diminished movies into mere content. Movies used to be special, so special you had to leave your house to go and see them. Yes, there have always been TV movies, but there was a stark line between the two. That’s all gone now, and the erasure of that line has not elevated TV movies, it has diminished all movies.
You see, TV movies were also once seen as something special. A Movie of the Week or an HBO movie — those weren’t events like theatrical events, but they still left a mark.
At this point, I see most streaming movies as something worse than content. I would call them filler.
Tarantino didn’t touch on the quality of movies, but that is also a factor. It used to be going to a movie was a pretty sure bet. Walking out of a movie disappointed was a rare thing. Today it’s rare to feel the movie was worth your time and money. Even if you catch a new movie for free on Amazon or Pluto or something, how often do you feel like it was worth the two hours?
Other than reviewing some new movies for Breitbart, I have retreated into the past and am rarely disappointed. Just the other day, I watched a 1954 movie I’d never even heard of called Drive a Crooked Road starring Mickey Rooney. It was a low-budget independent noir distributed by Columbia Pictures and the best “new” movie I’ve seen in months. Same with a 1957 movie starring Jeff Chandler and Orson Welles called Man in the Shadow. An “issue” movie about the cold-blooded murder of a Mexican immigrant and how a white sheriff has to overcome his own prejudice and the town’s to do the right thing.
They might be 85-minute programmers pushing seventy years of age, but they have something to say about the human condition by way of relatable characters who behave like real people, not robots programmed by woketards to check off a box.
John Nolte’s first and last novel, Borrowed Time, is winning five-star raves from everyday readers. You can read an excerpt here and an in-depth review here. Also available in hardcover and on Kindle and Audiobook.
